Poems

from “After Dinner Was Over”

I am enlightened, a mansays after dinner, and he doesn’tmean what you thinkhe means, he means he’s a productof the Enlightenment, he’s talkingover his pain in the abyssinside his gum, it’s calledan abscess (we actually call itthat, he’s taken painkillers,he’s swallowed themwith the wine offered him).

*

Hawks in the trees. Mentalking about philosophy. Lemonjulienned over the chickenturning colorsin an adequate oven. Good times,for a minute. The argumentabout the correct use of the word surveillancefalls over my body.

*

The first time, I drank a beerand hated it. The second, I cravedsugar water the colors of Gonewith the Wind, the third,I just saw everything disappear.Most men say they wouldgive birth if they could.

*

The crossroads. What you bringthere to bury. The journey. Constant circling back, later at night,and in darker weather. Terribleto lose touch with your friends.Forgive the metaphor that defends.The usual becomes treacherous.In the dream, all of them had children and livedtogether in the samehouse where it was alwaysHalloween, deckedwith pumpkins and ghosts.

*

I could tryto be scared but not afraid.Looking into the chickencoop like a wolf.

*

Days late, I could see a snakemoving across the surfaceof the lake, writing its path,unwriting the path it didnot take. But it wasn’tto be, that time. The effortmade towards what I wished.

*

You climbed the mountain with me, a recoveringmoralist. You wantedto stay on the path,I wanted to find it.

About This Poem

“I wake up every morning feeling like we are in the middle of a national misunderstanding. Before the election happened, earlier in the summer, I’d started writing about conversations that break down, or become arguments. These short poems from ‘After Dinner Was Over’ were written after a dinner party on a beautiful night frayed into discord. I wrote ‘Anger’ on the cover of the notebook I drafted them in, but the current title echoes the Catholic Eucharistic prayer: ‘When supper was ended, he took the cup. Again he gave you thanks and praise, gave the cup to his disciples and said…’ There are so many subjects we cannot talk about without hurting each other or feeling threatened and still we have to live together.”—Katie Peterson

I remembered what it was like,
knowing what you want to eat and then making it,
forgetting about the ending in the middle,
looking at the ocean for
a long time without restlessness,
or with restlessness not inhabiting the joints,
sitting Indian style on a porch
overlooking that water, smooth like good cake frosting.
And then I experienced it, falling so deeply
into the storyline, I laughed as soon as my character entered
the picture, humming the theme music even when I’d told myself
I wanted to be quiet by some freezing river
and never talk to anyone again.
And I thought, now is the right time to cut up your shirt.

A picnic in the sequoias, lightfiltered into planes, and the canopycut through. Fire raged in that placeone month ago. Since I’d been there,I’d have to see it burning.Nature of events to brushagainst us like the leavesof aspens brush against eachother in a grove full of themcarved with the initialsof people from the small weird townhikers only like for gas. Messagesget past borders—wateracross the cut stem of the sentsunflower alive with goodintentions. People who mistakeclarity for certainty haven’t learnedthat listening isn’t takinga transcript, it’s not speechthe voice longs for, it’s somethingdeeper inside the throat.Now, from the beginning, recitethe alphabet of everythingyou should have wanted, silverware,a husband, a house to live inlike a castle, but I wantedfame among the brave.A winter night in desert light:trucks carving out air-corridorsof headlight on the interstateat intervals only a vigilcould keep. Constellationsso clean you can seethe possibilities denied.Talking about philosophymight never be dinnerbut can returnyour body to a stateof wonder before sleep.The night reduced usto our elements.I wanted water, and whateverfound itself unbornin me to stay alive.

Katie Peterson

2015

Related Poems

By the last few times we saw her it was clear
That things were different. When you tried to help her
Get out of the car or get from the car to the door
Or across the apartment house hall to the elevator
There was a new sense of heaviness
Or of inertia in the body. It wasn't
That she was less willing to be helped to walk
But that the walking itself had become less willing.
Maybe the stupid demogorgon blind
Recalcitrance of body, resentful of the laws
Of mind and spirit, was getting its own back now,
Or maybe a new and subtle, alien,
Intelligence of body was obedient now
To other laws: "Weight is the measure of
The force with which a body is drawn downward
To the center of the earth"; "Inertia is
The tendency of a body to resist
Proceeding to its fate in any way
Other than that determined for itself."
That evening, at the Bromells' apartment, after
She had been carried up through the rational structure
By articulate stages, floor after flashing floor,
And after we helped her get across the hall,
And get across the room to a chair, somehow
We got her seated in a chair that was placed
A little too far away from the nearest table,
At the edge of the abyss, and there she sat,
Exposed, her body the object of our attention--
The heaviness of it, the helpless graceless leg,
The thick stocking, the leg brace, the medical shoe.
At work between herself and us there was
A new principle of social awkwardness
And skillfulness required of each of us.
Our tones of voice in this easy conversation
Were instruments of marvelous finesse,
Measuring and maintaining with exactitude
"The fact or condition of the difference
There was between us, both in space and time."
Her smiling made her look as if she had
Just then tasted something delicious, the charm
Her courtesy attributed to her friends.
This decent elegant fellow human being
Was seated in virtue, character, disability,
Behind her the order of the ranged bookshelves,
The windows monitored by Venetian blinds--
"These can be raised or lowered; numerous slats,
Horizontally arranged, and parallel,
Which can be tilted so as to admit
Precisely the desired light or air."
We were all her friends, Maggie, and Bill, and Anne,
And I, and the nice Boston Brahmin elderly man
Named Duncan, utterly friendly and benign.
And of course it wasn't whether or not the world
Was benign but whether it looked at her too much.
She wasn't "painfully shy" but just the same
I wouldn't be surprised if there had been
Painfulness in her shyness earlier on,
Say at dancing school. Like others, though, she had
Survived her childhood somehow. Nor do I mean
She was unhappy. Maybe more or less so
Before her marriage. One had the sense of trips
Arranged, committees, concerts, baffled courage
Living it through, giving it order and style.
And one had the sense of the late marriage as of
Two bafflements inventing the sense they made
Together. The marriage seemed, to the outside world,
And probably was, radiant and triumphant,
And I think that one could almost certainly say
That during the last, heroic, phase of things,
After his death, and after the stroke, she had
By force of character and careful management,
Maintained a certain degree of happiness.
The books there on the bookshelves told their stories,
Line after line, all of them evenly spaced,
And spaces between the words. You could fall through the spaces.
In one of the books Dr. Johnson told the story:
"In the scale of being, wherever it begins,
Or ends, there are chasms infinitely deep;
Infinite vacuities. . .For surely,
Nothing can so disturb the passions, or
Perplex the intellects of man so much,
As the disruption of this union with
Visible nature, separation from all
That has delighted or engaged him, a change
Not only of the place but of the manner
Of his being, an entrance into a state
Not simply which he knows not, but perhaps
A state he has not faculties to know."
The dinner was delicious, fresh greens, and reds,
And yellows, produce of the season due,
And fish from the nearby sea; and there were also
Ashes to be eaten, and dirt to drink.